It was a trip I had always wanted to take; The legendary journey along the Trans Siberian Railway. Denmark, my native country, you can cross in five hours by train, but in Russia the distances are huge. I was curious if the connection between people and places would feel different considering the fact that I would pass every tree, every house and every village on my way to Beijing. The first chock came already when I entered the train. It was completely empty.
The whole idea of the project had been to meet people on the train and make intimate stories from the train compartments. But riding this ghost-train, I had to change the concept: The intimate work had to come from my encounters with people in the cities and the train became the read thread connecting Moscow, Ulaanbaartar and Beijing. On the train I ended up with my camera glued to the window photographing the change of landscape as we were let along the russian forests, the mongolian desert and through the mountains to Beijing.

But it was not only Russia, Mongolia and China that was unknown land to me - so was my equipment. It was my first time using a digital camera. Everything was new, but then again, my ambition is always the same; to use the camera as a tool to create contact,
closeness and intimacy. I want to meet people, to connect with the cities, to make the places mine, even if it’s just for a short while. I had the greatest experience in Mongolia, when I ran into a group of Mongolian hunters who invited me to join them on a trip through the mountains that surround Ulaanbaatar. This reminded me of my life in Greenland. When I was 23 I lived in a small settlement of the East Coast of Greenland, where I was trained as a hunter. The relation you create to
nature as a hunter has had a big influence on my life and my work. Meeting the Mongolian hunter, I immediately felt like putting the camera on a shelf and picking up the riffle. When he shot and slaughtered a deer, we drank the warm blood
and ate the raw liver together.

Every time I start a new project, I start shooting in color, because I am afraid to repeat myself, but later I realize that it is not really something I can make a rational decision about. If I can't emotionally connect with my images, if I can't feel that pinch in my stomach, they mean nothing to me, and so I always return to bw and find my voice again. Working with black and white has always been the most direct way for me to reach more existential questions. In black and white I feel my images are not bound to a specific location or time. They create their own universe.

I like to think they are about something else and more than just what they show. At least that's my ambition; to focus on our emotions and a state of mind that is not defined by how we look or where we come from, but on the things that connect us and make us
dependent on each other.
It is not a coincidence that my image of a young couple in Moscow contain the same emotions as my image of a young couple in Beijing.

The most bizarre question I ever got from a journalist was from a photo-Magazine asking me if the figures in my images were mannequins. The mannequin-series, he called it. He simply did not believe that it was possible to photograph humans like this. But the
people I photograph are real, and I look at them, and I try to find something that connect us. I try to find a piece of myself in them. I feel warm when I look at two people desperately holding on to each other, saying: I cannot live without you. I admire all the people I take pictures of because they put themselves in a very vulnerable position. They trust me, and it is important for me that there's a mutual
understanding of this. That we are communicating in a way where it's not just ‘me looking at them’, but there's some kind of exchange. It has always been my ambition not only to look, but also take part in life. It can be quite frustrating, especially if you have a tight deadline. If I meet someone playing soccer in the street, I immediately feel like playing with them
instead of just watching. I never found it interesting to look at someone from the other side of the street, or to be “invisible” as a photographer. I hope this is the reason why people never feel like a voyeur looking at my images – because you feel that you are taking part. To me, this is when images grow from showing to being. This is when the pictures are not telling a story about “them” but about “us”.
Jacob Aue Sobol

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Jacob Aue Sobol was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1976. He lived in Canada from 1994-95 and Greenland from 2000-2002. In Spring 2006 he moved to Tokyo, living there 18 months before returning to Denmark in August 2008. After studying at the European Film College, Jacob was admitted to Fatamorgana, the Danish School of Documentary and Art Photography in 1998. There he developed a unique, expressive style of black-and-white photography, which he has since refined and further developed.

In the autumn of 1999 he went to live in the settlement Tiniteqilaaq on the East Coast of Greenland. Over the next three years he lived mainly in this township with his Greenlandic girlfriend Sabine and her family, living the life of a fisherman and hunter but also photographing. The resultant book Sabine was published in 2004 and the work was nominated for the 2005 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

In the summer of 2005 Jacob traveled with a film crew to Guatemala to make a documentary about a young Mayan girl’s first journey to the ocean. The following year he returned by himself to the mountains of Guatemala where he met the indigenous family Gomez-Brito. He stayed with them for a month to tell the story of their everyday life. The series won the First Prize Award, Daily Life Stories, World Press Photo 2006.

In 2006 he moved to Tokyo and during the next two years he created the images from his recent book I, Tokyo. The book was awarded the Leica European Publishers Award 2008 and published by Actes Sud (France), Apeiron (Greece), Dewi Lewis Publishing (Great Britain), Edition Braus (Germany), Lunwerg Editores (Spain) and Peliti Associati (Italy).

With its “Bread and Roses” exhibition the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro reflects on the theme of EXPO 2015, highlighting the human need to feed both body and spirit.

The expression “Bread and Roses”, coined by Marx, taken up by the American suffragettes and adopted by the workers movement from 1912, masterfully sums up the need to associate bread with the deep desire to be nourished with affective ties and projects, and roses with the necessity to cultivate passions, to acquire knowledge, to weave social relationships.

The image that the curator, Marco Meneguzzo, wanted to impress on this exhibition is that of art as metaphor of a problem, rather than a “document” of existence. For this reason, five artists were chosen who come from completely different genres, generations and poetics, whose common thread is the ability to develop a theme or condition, through fabulous metaphors that are separated from the immediate relationship with the problem, but that subtly come back to it in a more universal and enduring way through the powerful influence of allegory.
Gianni Caravaggio, Loris Cecchini, Chiara Dynys, Pino Deodato and Giuseppina Giordano have interpreted the theme “feed the planet” according to highly personalised and not casual visions. In almost all cases we are dealing with works that were created in recent years, before the theme became the Expo slogan, or, for some of the artists, they concern their own fields of research and action. The result, therefore, is an exhibition that emphasises how artists are intuitive and prophetic concerning the great questions of humans and humanity, even when their work appears personal, spiritual or even metaphysical.
To accompany the exhibition the fifth bilingual (Italian/English) edition of the “Quaderni”, containing a critical essay Marco Meneguzzo, will illustrate the works installed in the exhibition space and give an account of the research and activity of each artist.